I will never understand the mindless, relentless praise this series gets in jrpg communities.

Don't get me wrong, I like it. I wouldn't have played all 8 games if I didn't like it. But fuck me there are some extremely obvious flaws that are completely overlooked. and I'm not talking things that ultimately rely on an opinion. I'm talking about flaws that no one should be defending if they're looking at game design in good faith.

For example, the way they introduce unmarked quests and missable collectables is infuriating. I can give specific examples across every game where you go through some sort of story cutscene or conversation in X location. You are moved out of X location and given control of your characters again. You are then expected TO GO BACK TO X LOCATION immediately to talk to some random ass NPC to get a completely unmarked quest, or book chapter, or recipe etc. Some times What the hell? There are some places where it isn't so bad, like, you just turn around and walk back into the building. There are other times where you walk through like 3 maps because for some fucking reason Falcom thought it'd be cool to move me for story reasons, and then expect me to back track across an entire goddamn city talking to every random fucking NPC on the off chance that they give me something instead of just flavor text. It's ridiculous.

I like the games, I would have stopped a long time ago if I didn't. But shit like that is infuriating.